Learn from the Best
The Best in Blogging series gives you proven strategies from top industry experts.
What the big box stores are doing right (even if it’s annoying)
Wal-Mart, Michael’s, Target – they all start pushing the holidays on us well before the holiday season begins, and the mad dash to holiday mania lurches along straight through the New Year.
Back-to-school savings are shoulder to shoulder with Halloween treats, and the minute back-to-school supplies are stowed, they’ll be replaced with Thanksgiving and Christmas goodies (even though you probably haven’t even had a chance to wear your Wonder Woman costume to a Halloween party yet).
How does this apply to you?
It can take search engine bots anywhere from a few days to a few months to index new content on your food blog. The earlier you publish and distribute your holiday-themed recipes and posts, the greater the likelihood that they’ll be readily available to recipe hunters when the holiday season does arrive. Go ahead and start sharing those posts when the box stores begin luring in the holiday shoppers with glitter and tinsel.
Re-gifting is not a faux pas on your food blog
It’s time to re-gift those posts from holidays’ past. They’ve already been crawled and indexed, which means that they stand an even better chance of being found than this year’s posts. (That’s not an excuse to avoid this year’s posts, however. Remember, you’ll want to re-gift them in the years to come.)
There’s a side benefit to building up and continually sharing from your library of indexed holiday posts. Popular websites like Yummly and BuzzFeed that begin sharing link round-ups to holiday-themed blog posts are always looking for new and interesting holiday finds. Re-sharing those older posts will increase your chances of being pulled into one of those viral lists.
Lay out the welcome mat for holiday visitors
Take a little time to spruce up your food blog for the holiday season. Consider adding holiday-themed images and lead magnets that’ll appeal to the holiday visitors. You could create a holiday leftovers recipe book or printable gift tag templates to entice visitors to your site. Hey, presto! You’ve got new subscribers. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
This is also a good time to corral your holiday-related recipes into categories on your food blog. You could have a general category for Holiday Recipes, or you could opt to go for more specific collections like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Eid al-Adha. Adding collections does more than help visitors find the recipes they’re looking for, it also keeps them on your site browsing and bakes SEO keywords right into your website itself.
Take a lesson from Seinfeld’s Festivus celebration
No, not the Feats of Strength or the Airing of Grievances. Save that for your family time.
Instead, consider the popularity that the idea of Festivus gained after the episode aired in 1997. The holidays can feel a little stale sometimes, and humans crave novelty. Take advantage of this natural appreciation for the unusual by offering alternatives to the tried, true, and overdone holiday topics, e.g. turkey and dressing and sugar cookies.
Not only will a different approach to the holidays satisfy your readers’ desire for surprise, but it’ll also help your food blog stand out in search engines. Trying providing a vegan alternative to meat-heavy meals or offering up a Senegalese holiday favorite in lieu of the been-there-done-that American fare.
The holidays are the perfect opportunity to reconnect with family, to remind friends that you cherish them with thoughtful gifts, and to indulge in a few epic feasts. And really, how often do you even get to say ‘feast’, much less indulge in a feast.
Of course, there’s also the preparation of the feast, the purchasing of the gifts, and the accommodating of the family. Because we’re human, we have a tendency to get ourselves all giddy with excitement about the idea of the holiday while keeping the realities at safe distance. And what does that lead to? Procrastination. Stress. General crabbiness.
Overcome the inclination to put off until the last minute what you can do today. Get your food blog holiday-ready today so that you can relax and enjoy the holiday season when it actually arrives.
How do you prepare your food blog for the holidays?
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